Review - Venom

This is honestly going to be the hardest review I have written so far. I'm not joking. I know it sounds like a joke but genuinely, there's a lot to unpack here and it's challenging all the critical faculties I've gained up to this point. So, we start with plot and may be coming undone already. A spaceship comes down to Earth with some symbiotes from a meteor that an evil "definitely not Elon Musk" entrepreneur wants to combine with humans for reasons. One of these symbiotes makes its way onto Eddie Brock, failed journalist, and inhabits his body with him. Hijinks happen, predictable plot twists jump up and nonsense b-plots arise. For example, another symbiote escaped the spaceship and latched onto a policewoman, an elderly Venezuelan lady and a little girl on its way to San Francisco. There's also the subplot about how Eddie's ex-girlfriend hates him but will almost certainly end up tonguing him by the end of the film. I guess what's most impressive about the plot is that it makes ZERO sense and is one of the less ridiculous aspects of the film because like I said folks, this is a ride.

So acting then. That's got to have something decent to talk about, right? RIGHT? Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods yet because the acting is pretty trash too. It starts bad with Riz Ahmed, who is usually a pretty solid actor but as the villain, he has little to do here. In the right hands, it would be a cheesy, scenery chewing role but Ahmed just doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Jenny Slate also comes off pretty bad, playing kind of like a live action version of her Zootopia character and that is not a compliment, wonderful as that film is. One of my favourite actresses, Michelle Williams, has a role here too as girlfriend lady so she has very little to do. There's one particular scene she's in that is completely unforgettable but otherwise, just a kind of blank slate of a character who this brilliant actress couldn't breathe any air into. Every single review you've seen though has talked about one performance and one performance only and rightly so because Tom Hardy is... Pretty insane. His accent, his posture, how sweaty he is. Everything about how he portrays Eddie Brock is so bizarre and can be perfectly summed up by that scene in the trailers where he says "Goodnight Mrs Chen" in the world's weirdest accent. In a confusing way though, that works. By being the most confusingly portrayed character in existence, Tom Hardy is a compelling screen presence who you'll struggle to take your eyes off and it works into the enjoyably bad aspect of the film.

When I talk about bad films, people often ask "But in what way is it bad?". With Venom, it's in every way. I instantly knew what kind of film it was going to be when there's an ambulance crash early on and it is horribly filmed and edited. It was just multiple shots from different angles of the same moment in the crash, because they actually flipped a car and wanted to get it looking good on screen. After the crash, a symbiote comes out through the roof and at this point you realise how awful the CG is going to be too. Obviously, that's a pretty big deal in superhero films, especially when one of your characters (our titular hero(?)) is made of CG. These two aspects combine to make action scenes a mess where they're so poorly edited and the CG is so poorly constructed that I was laughing hysterically during most of them. I felt like an asshole but I couldn't stop, even as a veteran of bad films. Tonally, as you can tell, it's also bizarre. I was laughing a lot but I don't think it was all intentional, even if some was, and especially the first half of the film is far, far, far too serious and very edgy. Like, over the credits we get a Run the Jewels song (that I'm pretty sure wasn't made for the film) and then an Eminem song that was actually made for the film. It's not a particularly great song but something about sitting in the cinema and letting Venom kind of wash over you as you hear Eminem rap the word "Venom" over and over again is kind of hysterical. All of these things make a film that is objectively awful but a really, really funny time.

You're getting that rare, fabled fourth paragraph this week because I want to talk about some of the more spoilery moments. Don't necessarily not read this if you haven't seen the film because the plot is stupid and doesn't matter and I won't go too in depth on it anyway. See, what it is that I want to talk about so very badly, and have been ranting about to my poor housemates since Wednesday, is She-Venom. At one point of the film, Venom has left Eddie Brock and he is about to be killed by the science dudes but Venom makes its way back to him. How you ask? Venom takes over a dog, then Michelle Williams who then becomes a weirdly curvaceous version of Venom who gets back into Brock by tonguing him. Seriously. It's as weird as it sounds. There's even a scene at the end of the film where they start talking about Venom with phrases like "Is he still inside you?" and "What did it feel like while he was in you?", to the point where I started seriously considering if Venom was a queer film. Hell, I saw this with my Uni's film society and all of us, a group of well rounded film viewers with deep opinions on cinema, could talk about nothing other than why this film needed a sexy Venom. Seriously, why do we need a sexy Venom and why can't I stop thinking about it? Moving on briefly, there's two post credits scenes that are pretty hilarious for different reasons. One sets up the character of Carnage for another film where Woody Harrelson with an awful red Bob Ross wig who says "You better get ready for... Carnage" and then the other one was such low effort from the Venom team that it is literally just a clip from the upcoming animated Spiderman film. Don't get me wrong, it looks great but I wasn't expecting an advert for a totally different film at the end of this film.

And so we reach the end of the Venom review. I hope you're a little drained and unsure how to go on with life because that's how the film left me. It's certainly an absolutely awful film and one that will deservedly go down as one of the worst of the year but I did have a blast. Being able to sit there and simultaneously laugh at and puzzle out this mess was a fascinating experience and one I have never really had before in the cinema. With that said, it's an abominable mess so even though I kind of recommend it as a "so bad it's good" film, it does still get a